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News from the world of maths: On thin ice

Submitted by plusadmin on May 22, 2009

Friday, May 22, 2009

After a gruelling 73 days each dragging 110kg of equipment in temperatures 40 degrees below zero, polar explorers Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley are now safely home in the UK spring sunshine. The aim of their expedition was to produce a comprehensive set of sea ice and snow thickness data in the Arctic, and despite technical problems, their data has already produced some surprising
results.

Our digital lives rely on distributed computer systems, such as the internet, but understanding the order of events in such systems is not always straightforward. Leslie Lamport explains how special relativity helped him order events in computer science, enabling the development of distributed computing.